


a model of decorum

by endquestionmark



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-07
Updated: 2015-10-07
Packaged: 2018-04-25 06:15:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,222
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4949833
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endquestionmark/pseuds/endquestionmark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gaby only wonders if she’s getting it right once, which is the first lie that she tells in the service of someone other than herself. It isn’t in the Plaza, when she hangs up the phone and does not for a single moment doubt what she needs to do, and it isn’t on the Vinciguerra grounds, over red wine and rendition, and it isn’t even when Vinciguerra jerks the wheel and she screams Illya’s name. It should be, maybe, but by then, events are too far along in motion: irreversible ignition, whether in an engine or a cartridge, is something which she knows too well to waste her energy fighting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a model of decorum

**Author's Note:**

> The ritual apportioning of blame: [Linden](https://archiveofourown.org/users/byzantienne), who knows exactly what she did; [Nat](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Febricant/); who also knows exactly what she did, and Lena in the distance, tritto. Gaby and Waverly play the most guarded of games.

Gaby only wonders if she’s getting it right once, which is the first lie that she tells in the service of someone other than herself. It isn’t in the Plaza, when she hangs up the phone and does not for a single moment doubt what she needs to do, and it isn’t on the Vinciguerra grounds, over red wine and rendition, and it isn’t even when Vinciguerra jerks the wheel and she screams Illya’s name. It should be, maybe, but by then, events are too far along in motion: irreversible ignition, whether in an engine or a cartridge, is something which she knows too well to waste her energy fighting.

In truth, Gaby has either spent two years wondering if she’s getting it right, or has never wondered at all; it doesn’t really matter to her either way. She has never fired a gun. She doesn’t know how to fight, not with any sort of method, and she only ever has pieces of a whole picture. It’s more than Illya or Napoleon get, but even so: irritating.

“Have I ever kept anything important from you?” Waverly says, over breakfast in Istanbul. It isn’t at all to Gaby’s taste, but she’s ordered it, and now she intends to finish it. She stares at his tea, at the tap of his fingertip on the rim of the glass, at the steam still rising from the surface, of which he appears to be unaware.

“How am I meant to know, if you don’t tell me?” Gaby says, and takes another sip of coffee.

“In retrospect,” Waverly amends, “would you have done anything differently given more information?”

“I don’t know,” Gaby says, throws it out like a retort and not the admission of defeat that she refuses to allow. “I don’t have that information.”

“Would you like it?” Waverly says.

It isn’t an offer to be taken lightly, not in their line of work; it probably isn’t genuine, but what difference does that make? It’s another piece in play. Gaby doesn’t like chess, has no particular patience for the incremental construction of strategy, but she’s watched Illya, head down over his pieces, meticulous in monochrome. She suspects that Waverly would play with conversational indifference, every move reasonable but unremarkable until the very endgame. There is nothing to his expression beyond courteous curiosity.

“Would it help?” she says, instead, a nothing move; it’s a pawn opening. It doesn’t count. Maybe she’s picked up more strategy than she would like, after all.

“Does it matter?” Waverly says, pawns to spare.

Gaby breaks eye contact to look, instead, at her coffee, an equally unappetizing option. She can’t win. If she lies, they’ll both know, and she won’t accept that; if she tells the truth, he’s been right all along. “You tell me,” she says, and lets Waverly read the annoyance from her face, giving no quarter. She’ll take stalemate over a forfeit.

“I’ll take that under advisement,” he says, and smiles. She frowns harder, as if it’ll somehow restore equilibrium.

“What about now?” Gaby says. “What are we doing here?”

“Seeing the sights,” Waverly says. “Enjoying the climate, if you like.”

“That doesn’t sound important,” Gaby says, and concedes the coffee for the moment. If Napoleon ever stops provoking Illya — he’s bound to run out of tie criticisms eventually, or Illya will simply strangle him — she can convince him to steal it with no trouble at all. It’ll be a good exercise for both of them.

“I’m sure something will come up eventually,” Waverly says.

“I’m sure,” Gaby says, flatly, and crosses her arms.

“We’re agreed, then,” he says, and pushes his tea across the table. She looks at him, caught for a moment between declining the courtesy and rising to the challenge. It isn’t even a question. She reaches for the glass. “Ah,” Waverly says, and she pauses. “Hold it by the rim or you’ll burn yourself.”

Gaby, trying to find something other than solicitousness in his crooked smile, has never been so inclined in her life to injure herself out of spite. She looks at the glass, and she looks back at Waverly, and she narrows her eyes.

She picks up the glass by the rim. “Agreed,” she says, and takes a sip, gives him nothing, nothing, nothing.

Waverly watches. “Good,” he says.

 

* * *

 

Istanbul is messy, because Illya is incapable of not being straightforward, and Napoleon is incapable of not being stylish, and Gaby is incapable of caring enough to keep them from conducting mutual campaigns of self-sabotage. She ends up with a gun to her head, because of course she does, in one of the half-shadowed bays of the inner Bedesten, the after-hours silence resounding — for once, Napoleon and Illya manage to keep their communication nonverbal — and her only thought is: _Oh, for God’s sake_.

She’s scared, of course. She isn’t stupid. It’s just that, in the scheme of things, it’s a nice change to be held impersonally hostage, a victim of circumstance.

Afterwards, she kicks her shoes off in her hotel room and takes a bottle of raki and a glass of cold water to bed. The glass of cold water has left a ring on her bedside table by the time that she remembers about it, and the taste has stuck in her throat by then, almost acrid. Gaby dips her fingers into the water and lets them drip into the raki, watches it bloom louche and translucent, and when the phone by her bed rings — at four in the morning, who else would it be — she lets it clamor for a long minute before she picks up.

“You know,” Waverly says, “they make some quite compact guns these days. Very understated.”

“I don’t want one,” Gaby says. She’s drunk, probably, though it’s hard to tell, lying down, and she’s doing her best to avoid sounding petulant. She doesn’t want to bother with trying, but here she is. “Isn’t that why I have a team? To watch my back?”

“Oh, I’m sure you’d know much better than I would,” Waverly says. “They are your team, after all.”

They aren’t her team. Or, rather, she thinks: they are her team, and she wishes they weren’t. The last thing she wants is to have to manage them, the way she’s seen Waverly do it, all unspoken understandings and long-term strategy. The last thing she wants is to be like him. She wants to throw this back in his face; she doesn’t want to show her hand.

Instead, she says: “I’m handling it.”

Waverly hums an answer, noncommittal. “Of course,” he says. “I’ll leave you to it.” He pauses, then adds: “I suppose it could have been a little neater, but well done.”

It takes a moment for her to register the click, the hum of the dial tone; for a moment, Gaby thinks that maybe he’s still listening, and refuses to give him the satisfaction of her annoyance. A little neater — with what she’s been given? with this team? — the bazaar is still standing. That’s neater than he has any right to expect, she thinks. _Well done_ — it’s so patronizing that she wants to snarl, but then — she can’t win. If she accepts the compliment, he’s right; if she rejects it as empty courtesy, he’s still right. If she spends the next few hours finishing the bottle and picking him apart a sentence and a tonality at a time, she loses. She can’t win without playing the game; she can’t play the game without putting herself on the line.

A gun, though: Waverly is right, of course. She’s been thinking it too. A gun is a tool, like a tracker, like a dead drop, like knowing how to make Napoleon want to steal her coffee, or how to make Illya switch the target of his singleminded focus between one breath and the next. There’s no reason for Gaby to not know how to use one.

Now, though: is it her idea or his? Maybe she’s spent too much time learning how he thinks; maybe he’s too good at knowing what she’ll say next. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Of course it matters.

When Gaby gets up, the room tilts; she is drunk, after all, which will pass with sleep, and petulant, which won’t. Her fingertips smell of raki, even after she runs them under cold water, and she presses them to her temple and fails to stave off the beginnings of a headache. She can’t win. She won’t forfeit. Her strategy is reactive; she wants to move, but doesn’t want to give him any more than he already has.

By doing so, she is anyway; no way out but forward. Gaby won’t lose any more sleep over it, even if she’s the only one who will know.

She watches the drift of the curtains for another hour, and can’t quite put the smell of anise from her mind.

 

* * *

 

In New York, Waverly dispatches Napoleon to commit property damage on his own terms and outside of work hours, and Illya does — whatever Illya does when he isn’t working, which Gaby really doesn’t know — something that doesn’t warrant her attention, anyway. Gaby sits in her furnished apartment and seethes at nothing in particular. The wallpaper is fairly generic in its egregiousness. The furniture is functional. The view is beautiful. She does a lot of crosswords and a lot of walking, learning new streets and the rhythm of the city, and puts off buying a winter coat, even though the evenings are getting colder.

Downtown, she sits in an Italian café and flips through glossy magazines from the season before last; the waitress forgets to bring her a teaspoon, so she stirs her coffee with a pen, and learns styles and colors. Gaby doesn’t intend to be dressed like a doll every time they have to travel and take on new names. If she’s to become someone else, she intends to do it on her own terms.

“Try the pastries,” Waverly says, and sets a plate down on the table, barely on the corner of Vogue Italia.

“They don’t usually seat strangers together,” Gaby says, without looking up. “Pity I can’t come here anymore.”

“Ah, but colleagues,” Waverly says, “are another matter entirely, particularly colleagues meeting over lunch. I’m so sorry to have kept you,” he says, as the waitress swings by, and adds, “Another coffee, please.”

“You can’t borrow my pen,” Gaby says.

“I won’t need to,” Waverly says. “Though it adds a touch of charming eccentricity — nicely diversionary.”

“Sometimes it just means that you haven’t got a spoon,” Gaby says. “Why are you here?”

“Sometimes one is in the mood for a doppio,” Waverly says. “Help yourself.”

When his coffee comes, there is a spoon on the saucer. On the plate, there are miniature cannoli, and more confectionary sugar than Gaby would like to risk; instead she picks up a tricolor slice, to her immediate regret when the chocolate sticks to her fingers. “Is this a test?” she says.

“Not at all,” Waverly says. “Sometimes sweets are just sweets.”

Sweets are never just sweets. This one tastes like marzipan, like bitter almonds, with which she has very particular associations, and apricot jam between the layers; Waverly drinks his espresso, and the window behind Gaby creaks in the wind. She finishes the slice, fingers sticky, and thinks: why is she here? What does she want?

She doesn’t want to be like Waverly. She doesn’t want to be like Napoleon, or Illya, or her father. She doesn’t want to think about any of them right now. She doesn’t want to play. She wants to win. (She isn’t stupid enough to think that winning means that she gets to stop playing.) Gaby wants to have the barest ounce of leverage, at least.

Waverly sets down his espresso, probably to say something that will annoy her even more, and she holds up her left hand. It only stops him for a second — “Venetians,” he says, “a little sweet for my taste—” but that’s long enough for her to lick the chocolate from her fingertips. If it were Napoleon doing this, he would be showy about it, and shameless, and get away with it anyway; if it were Illya, he would be completely unaware of what it looked like, or so resentful that it would only succeed as farce.

Gaby isn’t Napoleon. Gaby isn’t Illya. Gaby might not be able to pull it off, but she knows that, and she does it anyway, eyes downcast at the glossy pages of Italia, and when she snaps her gaze upwards to meet Waverly’s, it’s an ultimatum. It feels like sailing over the Berlin Wall; it feels like theory put into practice. _If he laughs_ , she thinks, _I’ll throw this coffee in his face_.

Waverly doesn’t laugh, though, and he doesn’t gape; he neither fails to ignore the trap nor falls prey to it. He smiles, barely enough to notice, but it isn’t the way that he smiles at Napoleon — a little astonished, a little despairing — or Illya — a little condescending — or anyone else she’s seen him work with, never any less than courteous. Waverly smiles at Napoleon the way that Napoleon wants him to, and at Illya the way that Illya needs him to, and Gaby has no doubt that he’s doing the same with her, but even so: it’s the response that she’s trying to get. That’s a victory, if she looks at it the right way, and that’s all that matters. Waverly smiles at her as if she’s surprised him; as if she’s impressed him with strategy and subterfuge; as if she presents him a challenge.

Good. She does.

“So,” Gaby says. “Let’s talk business.”

 

* * *

 

Most of the time, Gaby doesn’t ask questions. Questions are for people who can’t figure out the answers themselves, or who can’t at least figure out why they haven’t been told to begin with. She goes, and she does, and she gets results, and then she waits to be told to go and do all over again. It isn’t perfect, but she’s no idiot: she can fill in the blanks for herself. She reads the newspapers. She knows what doesn’t make the headlines.

Napoleon, for whatever reason, doesn’t care, or doesn’t show any indication of doing so, if he does. He does the job, and at the end of the day, he does whatever Napoleon Solo does in his off-hours — probably inculcate scandal in the society pages, or commit petty theft out of boredom — and if he knows how important their work is, then it certainly doesn’t show. Gaby gets the sense that he’s used to landing on his feet, and sees impossible odds as an opportunity to show off. If it’s a game that they’re playing, he’s more interested in style than strategy, and, annoyingly, he’s good enough to pull it off every single time.

Illya cares in a way that is transparently, uncomfortably personal, of course. He is incapable of uncoupling his performance from his worth, or rather — Gaby has spent less time thinking about this than she would like, but what else is her personal damage good for — from the negative balance of it. If Napoleon owes Saunders another five years, Illya owes Oleg for the sins of his father, a far less quantifiable sentence. It’s far too easy to get under Illya’s skin, but at least there’s something there: wounded, yes; probably beyond fixing, yes; as emotionally straightforward as a child, certainly. There is nothing under Napoleon’s skin to get at. The most he’ll give her is more artifice, even though they both know it, so it’s almost like the truth; if she wants more, Gaby thinks, she’ll have to give him more than it’s worth. She isn’t going to do that. She knows everything that she needs to already.

That’s the crux of it, really: she knows, or she can figure it out. Questions lack nuance. In Paris, Waverly calls on them in person, and she drinks neat gin nestled into the corner of a booth in the hotel bar and watches him handle Napoleon and Illya. Gaby wonders what she’d find if she dug her fingernails into the cracks — the deep crow’s-feet visible even when his expression is one of polite neutrality; the way that, sometimes, he goes inscrutably blank; the sheaves of politesse which dictate his every action — and pulled. Probably someone entirely nondescript, she thinks bitterly; probably Gaby would find a furnished house, unremarkable in quality, a perfectly satisfactory facsimile of an English gentleman, with perhaps an acceptable eccentricity or two. Stamp collecting seems his sort of pastime.

The bar is lit like all hotel bars, which is to say with an emphasis on illusory concealment, and really with an emphasis on making sure that nobody escapes without racking up a tab; Napoleon and Illya, off to stake out an embassy — “And work on that subtlety,” Waverly had said — had somehow managed, and Gaby is certainly doing her best. The gin is proving a challenge, though, and for something to do, she says: “You would have let them kill each other, wouldn’t you?”

Waverly doesn’t ask her what she means, at least, which means that they’re on the same page, and that he might even give her an answer honest in its completeness. “It would have been an indicative outcome either way,” he says, finally, taking a cigarette case from his jacket. “Do you mind?”

Gaby frowns a _no_ at him, and watches him light up, flame reflected in his glasses for a moment, before he shakes the match out and leaves it in the ashtray. “I would have been disappointed,” Waverly says. “After all, we’d put in quite a lot of work. It would have been a wasted investment. All that time and trouble, for something out of a tabloid? Rather definitive, I think.” He looks at her. “Don’t you? No point in putting in more work to wind up with loose ends.”

“So they would have deserved it,” she says. That’s why she’s here, isn’t it; to say the things that he won’t, and do the things that he can’t, and to know the things that he doesn’t need to know.

“I wouldn’t put it quite like that,” Waverly says, “but I suppose so, yes, if you must.”

“What about me?” Gaby says. “Back over the Wall, I suppose?”

“If you’d insisted, I would have had no choice,” Waverly says. “You’ve spent quite long enough waiting, though, wouldn’t you say?”

“I didn’t know that I had a choice,” Gaby says, and taps her finger on the side of the glass. She’s picked that habit up from somewhere, and she doesn’t like not knowing why. She’ll have to unlearn it immediately.

“You could always have asked,” Waverly says mildly.

Gaby snorts into the glass.

“Suit yourself,” he says, and stands. “Work, I’m afraid, never sleeps.” He shrugs his jacket into place, and then catches himself; it might be a mannerism, or it might be genuine. If there’s a difference, Gaby can’t tell. “Where are my manners,” Waverly says, and offers her the cigarette case.

How does he know? How does he know, every time, exactly what to say or do to remind her that it’s her move, her turn, her game too?

Gaby takes a cigarette and inspects it. “You smoke like an old man,” she says. Lie.

“Let the punishment fit the crime,” Waverly says — lie — and offers her the open flame of his lighter. Gaby leans in and inhales, and wonders if, just as the flame had wiped away his face to an overexposed blank, it illuminates hers. She wonders what he sees. She won’t ask; she simply wants to know. She looks up at him through her lashes.

“You look tired,” Waverly says. “Tomorrow, then.”

It’s a dismissal. Gaby does not want to be dismissed. She wants him to watch her smoke, and she wants him to do nothing else for the duration. She wants oil under her nails. She wants the gin to be finished, so that she can stop making herself drink it.

Instead, she purses her lips and blows out smoke the way Napoleon does, head tilted back, and watches Waverly through the indistinctness. “Suits you,” she says.

“Good night, Gaby,” he says — is that all? of course that’s all — and she turns back to her gin, so that she doesn’t watch him leave, and forces herself to consider other things.

 

* * *

 

In Rio, Napoleon gets shot — in Barra da Tijuca, of all places — by a nervy mark, and Gaby knows that once Illya starts moving, their cover is blown. They’re in the outside seating of a restaurant which is adjacent to the property, and the patio isn’t crowded, but it isn’t empty, either. If she can’t stop him before he vaults the fence in the sudden dead silence, they’re all dead, never mind the mark. He’s already halfway out of his chair. “Sit,” she snaps, and he freezes. Gaby doesn’t look away, doesn’t blink, until he does as if compelled. “Do you want,” she says, under her breath and furious, “to have wasted our time? Hmm? Do you want the mission to fail?”

It’s not fair of her, and she knows it before the words are out of her mouth, but it’ll work. She spits the last word like a curse. She can’t knock Illya over now, not the way she did in the Plaza, catching him off balance and off guard, not unless he lets her; then, he had responded instinctively, and broken the coffee table to boot. Now, he just goes blank, wiped away like a message in the mirror, eyes flat as silvered glass. “Good,” Gaby says, and doesn’t let herself regret it, not now.

Napoleon can take care of himself, anyway, and he does, even if he ruins the upholstery in their rented living room in the process. It’s an unpleasant faded chartreuse anyway, but the stain will never come out, rust-red fading already by the time that they get there, and Napoleon leaving blood smears all over the bathroom tiles. “I wouldn’t say no to a little help,” he calls, when Gaby lets the door slam, and she jerks her head at Illya.

“Well?” she says.

He goes, moving — by rote, she thinks, like someone who’s only just learned the choreography — like someone who hasn’t quite figured out how to inhabit the steps yet. Gaby follows him, and watches his vacant manipulation of forceps, the impersonal hand that he wraps around Napoleon's side to hold him still; she observes the fresh red of blood that wells up when he drops the bullet by the sink, and the way that Napoleon holds in place for the stitches in his side, bruises already blooming, and the way that he’s a little slow afterwards, drifts a little when he stands up and has to catch himself before he leans against the wall. Outside, a cabinet door clicks, and then there’s the chime of glass. She doesn’t blame him.

Illya washes up, water running pink and then clear in the basin, and leaves the bullet where it fell, tacky when Gaby taps it with her finger. She leans against the door frame, and considers. “Thank you,” she tries, but only gets an absent nod for her troubles. “Illya,” she says, and he looks at her — hasn’t spoken a word since he sat back down, not since they left the restaurant, and not when Napoleon flinched away from the forceps — as if there’s something he wants to say, but he doesn’t know how.

Gaby takes him by the wrists, the way she did in Rome, and leads him out of the bathroom; his sleeve is wet, where he didn’t push it up far enough, and she pushes his jacket off his shoulders. “Shouldn’t it be me you’re undressing?” Napoleon says. “I didn’t get shot in order to for you to ignore me.”

“You seem to be doing just fine,” Gaby retorts, and leaves the jacket over the arm of the sofa; she sits, and gives Illya no option but to follow, and then she pushes at his shoulders until he’s settled on the carpet by her feet. “Don’t,” she says, before Napoleon can complain about that as well. He holds up his hands in surrender, and returns to his scotch, color high in his cheeks, and that’s something she puts aside to think about later.

Right now, though, Illya is just — gone, hollow, and Gaby thinks: _what if I can’t put him back together?_ Which is ridiculous, of course; the closest she’ll get is hardly whole, and she should know — waiting for her, a run-down mechanism, and she knows what to do with those. She ignores Napoleon’s raised eyebrow and rests her hand on the back of Illya’s neck, rubs the knurl of his spine with her thumb, presses until he barely leans into her hand, back a little less straight than usual. Gaby curls her fingers through his hair, and Illya presses back into the contact, so she slides her hand a little higher and brushes her thumb at the back of his ear, and realizes that Napoleon has been quiet for far too long for her to be comfortable.

When she looks up, though, he isn’t grinning — awful — and he doesn’t look knowing, particularly — worse — but there’s something to his expression that she can’t read at all. Napoleon’s face is a blank, but in the tilt of his head, and the look in his eyes, she thinks, that’s where it is. An abstract curiosity, maybe, or the idea of a desire which he hasn’t quite pinned down yet, or maybe Gaby’s missed the mark entirely, but whatever it is, Napoleon doesn’t know either, and whoever he’s being, whatever he’s doing, he’ll be turning the problem of it over until he finds a point of entry. That’s what he does.

She’s got them. Gaby’s got them. Illya leans his head, heavy, against her leg, and he won’t thank her, not unless she’s broken him worse than she can fix, but at least he’s slipping back to them. Napoleon — well, nobody ever really has Napoleon, but she’s not pretending otherwise to herself, at least — hasn’t moved since she first put her hand on Illya’s neck. He hasn’t slipped away. She’s getting it right.

Gaby doesn’t tell Waverly this, when he calls, much later, after Napoleon has given in to blood loss and fatigue, and after Illya has gone to sleep off an excess of competency and contact, most likely. She wants to, of course, but she isn’t going to bring this to him like some great success when it’s the smallest of victories. It’s what she does, and she doesn’t want to lower his expectations by implying otherwise, but she has to remind herself of that. Gaby wants a seat at the table. She wants to sit at the head of the table. She won’t get that by coming empty-handed.

“Well done,” Waverly says, and this time, Gaby doesn’t think that he’s being patronizing. She’s smoking out the kitchen window with Napoleon’s unfinished scotch from earlier, overlarge cotton rolled past her wrists and her ankles. “Not ideal, of course, to have to clean up that sort of thing, but you handled it well.”

Gaby waits a moment, to see if he’s going to add anything, then says, as professional and sincere as she can make it: “Thank you.” He’s right. She did handle it well, and she kept it quiet and neat, and she doesn’t expect any less of herself, but she’ll still acknowledge it.

“Quite a quick study,” he says.

“Two years is quick?” Gaby says, and winces a little; apparently she’s used up all her sincerity for the night.

“Kuryakin took three,” Waverly says, “and — well. I’m sure you’ll agree — that was with certain concessions when it came to subtlety. No, you’re—” and there, he pauses. Gaby bites back reflexive sarcasm, and finally, he goes on: “—something else entirely. An effective operative, but, better yet, a good one.”

“I thought I was a spy,” Gaby says, and taps her cigarette against the windowsill. Ash drifts along the ledge, and she flicks it away idly.

“Did you?” Waverly says.

“You tell me,” Gaby says.

“I think,” Waverly says, “that you know,” and there it is, that’s what infuriates her about this: it’s all games within games within games, and nothing is what it seems. Every piece is in its place for a reason. She can’t dismiss anything as happenstance. She does know, and he knows that, and so on. The fun of it isn’t in the play itself, but in the prolonging of it, the carefully balanced détente and the endless stalemate. If she wins, she’ll never play him again. If he does, she’ll take herself to pieces trying to find some way to dethrone him.

She taps her finger on the side of the glass, and remembers, suddenly, where she picked up that particular habit: tea, Istanbul, steam curling from glass. Gaby thinks that she’ll keep it, after all, as a reminder.

“You tell me,” she says.

 

* * *

 

In London — which she doesn’t like particularly; it’s kinder than Berlin at this time of year, and Napoleon prefers it to New York once the cold sets in, but there’s a weariness to it — they meet Waverly in his office for the first time. It’s the usual round of manila folders and newspaper clippings and insufficient briefings, so instead Gaby learns the space, in case it ever becomes useful. She had thought that Waverly, in his element, would be nondescript, and he is, from the green leather top of his desk to the heavy drapery in his office, the overcoat hanging from the back of the door and the tray on the side table and the way that sound fails to carry through the space. It is one of the back rooms in which matters are decided, and from which nothing issues but consequence.

When Waverly dismisses them, Gaby waits behind. He shuffles papers for a moment, and finally folds his hands. “What can I do for you, then,” he says.

“I hear they make quite compact guns now,” Gaby says. She pauses for a moment, in a mockery of thought. “Understated, even.”

“So I’m told,” Waverly says, and his smile is nothing more or less than polite.

“Something like that could be quite useful to me in the field,” she says. “I don’t suppose you’d know where I could get one.”

“Well,” Waverly says, “as it so happens, I might have some suggestions. What are you thinking of? I’m sure we can find something for you to get used to, maybe something a little more straightforward to start with.”

“Don’t worry,” Gaby says, and her sarcasm, too, is nothing less than politeness between professionals. Any less would be gauche. “I can handle it.”

“I’m sure you can,” Waverly says.

“I wouldn’t say no to some pointers, though,” Gaby adds — it isn’t a game without a little risk, after all, and she’s always liked to raise the odds — “I don’t suppose you’d know about that, either.”

“Since you mention it,” Waverly says, “I might have some ideas,” and Gaby meets his eyes, doesn’t blink, doesn’t back down, doesn’t hold her breath. His move: check.

 

 


End file.
